Tomato & overloaded router

hello forum, this seems to be the place to go for Tomato questions, couldn't find any official board for this firmware. Maybe someone here can figure out what is happening with my router, or point me in the right direction.

For the last year i had DD-WRT v23 sp2 up and running, but missed some features which i found in Tomato. Yesterday i flashed my 2 routers and set them up for WDS. Everything went well and all the basics seem to work. So i tried to put some pressure on the line and started some heavy p2p (torrent + emule with lots of well seeded downloads).
After few minutes i couldnt reach my Router Interface anymore, or any Internet site. Funny thing is, p2p was still working and i could reach the second router over WDS. There was no sign of any slowdown, it seems some services just shut down.
If one of the p2p programms is shut down, the router begins to respond again after few minutes. It looks like some kind of bottleneck i hit. This didnt happen with DD-WRT, so i think it isnt the hardware.

I know about max connections (set to 4096) and timeout for established connections (set to 90). Connection number doesnt ever reach the max value.
Tested it with QOS and without QOS, it didnt change. While running QOS, http and dns requests are set to high, everything else to lowest.

which router are you using? not all are up to the job of handling 4096 connections, at least with ddwrt. not sure about tomato. for instance, i have a wr850g that's real weak with 4096. 2048 seems to be the upper limit already. that's with ddwrt though.

also, when things start going south, check the router to see how many connections there are? you could be bouncing off the limit as it is.

sorry i didnt answer earlier, the problem was caused by my software firewall (sygate).
I'm still noch sure what happens there, but sometimes tomato freaks the hell out of sygate and any new connection outside the LAN is blocked as the result. Established connections like p2p still work fine, but it isnt possible to open any internet sites or open any new connection for a few minutes. When the firewall is disabled, averything works again.

Anyway, it doesnt happen often and isnt bad enough for me to go back to dd-wrt.

so are you still sticking to sygate? wow.. it's good that you managed to narrow it down.. now I know why that happens occasionally no matter what firmware i use. Coz i've been using sygate for more than 5 yrs.. don't plan to change though...